What if NTRP ratings were gender neutral? A hypothetical NTRP level distribution

As part of my year-end stats series of posts, I looked at year-end distribution by level, overall and by men and women, focusing on the change from 2017 to 2018.

What I didn't show in a single chart was how the men's and women's counts compare in the same chart.  Here that is.

We can see that more women play than men, and women make up well over half the population at a level until you get to the 4.0 level, when the men get close to 50% and at 4.5 there are more men than women.  No big surprises here, the most players are at the 3.5 level by a significant margin, then 4.0, then 3.0.

A sometimes discussed topic is how men and women of the same level compare, or what a gender neutral league might look like.  Yes, there is Mixed league today, but that isn't really gender neutral as male/female pairs play each other, you never have a man playing a woman in singles or unbalanced doubles.

The USTA does not include any play between the genders for Adult/C ratings, so there is nothing in the NTRP system to tell us that a 3.5 man and 3.5 woman are or aren't the same.  But it is generally understood that a male of a level will on average be stronger than the female of the same level.

A common hypothesis is that a male player of the same level is about one level (0.5 NTRP rating) higher than the equivalent female, e.g. a 3.5 male and 4.0 female are probably of similar ability.  The reality is that that isn't true at every level, at least it isn't an exact 0.5 difference, and certainly there are exceptions, but it is a rough rule of thumb one can use, and one exact level makes my analysis below easy, so we'll go with it.

So we can imagine for a minute, what the distribution by level might be if we had gender neutral ratings by simply adding 0.5 to all the male players, e.g. shifting the blue segments of the chart above down a column.  Rather than making you do the mental exercise, here is that chart.

By moving the 3.0 men to 3.5, and 3.5 men to 4.0, etc. we see a change in the distribution.  There are now nearly as many "4.0s" as "3.5s", and nearly as many "4.5s" as "3.0s".  We also see that women would out number the men through "4.0" and only at "4.5" would there be more men than women.

If we had gender neutral ratings, then gender neutral leagues could more easily be played and it appears that the "4.0" level would be very competitive with nearly equal men and women being eligible for the level.  All the others would have a significant bias towards more women (3.5 and below) or men (4.5 and above).

I don't think any of the above is going to happen any time soon.  NTRP is not suddenly going gender neutral nor are gender neutral leagues in the offing, at least to my knowledge, so all of this is just a hypothetical what if.  But seeing the distribution above, would you be interested or willing to play in a gender neutral league?  Or do you like things the way they are now with Mixed the only league where men and women play and then only as pairs against each other?